


Look for the exit wound

by tamaraface



Category: Jessica Jones (TV)
Genre: Best Friends, Character Study, Dubious Consent, F/F, Friends to Lovers, Mind Control, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-03
Updated: 2015-12-03
Packaged: 2018-05-04 17:42:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5342795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tamaraface/pseuds/tamaraface
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Trish doesn’t say that now, doesn’t say anything. She keeps her head on Jess’s shoulder, her eyes open just enough to catch the rise and fall of Jess’s chest as she breathes. Trish slows her own breathing to match, finds Jess’s hand with her own in the tiny space between them and tangles their fingers.</p><p>or, Trish and Jessica and getting by.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Look for the exit wound

**Author's Note:**

> Title and excerpt from Caitlyn Siehl's "Survival." Non-graphic allusions to abortion, canonical liberties taken, canon-typical violence and dub-con, spoilers for the series.

"This is how we survive:  
**We survive**."  


\--

Her mother sends flowers; tastefully arranged and not quite expensive, but made to look like it. Trish sweeps the bouquet off of her desk and into her wastebasket with the flat of one sweaty palm, doesn’t read the card.

If her hands tremble when she slips on her headphones, when she adjusts her mic, it’s stage fright. 

Trish swallows hard past the racing heart that’s lodged in her throat, waits for the “on air” sign to illuminate.

\--

Jessica is there, at the bar, when she enters the restaurant. Trish actually hesitates in the doorway for a moment from the shock of it. It takes the subtle clearing of the hostess’s throat, the soft inquiry of “Ma’am?” to steal Trish’s attention from the back of Jessica’s neck, the sharp upsweep of her hair.

“Thank you,” Trish manages in the girl’s general direction. She starts walking towards the bar where Jessica’s nursing a drink and waiting for her, early, for possibly the first time ever. “I see her.”

Trish greets Jessica with a hug when she reaches her. It’s maybe a little too enthusiastic, she maybe surprises Jessica with the force of it because it takes a beat before Jess reaches an arm around her and hugs Trish back, but she does. Eventually.

Her barstool grates across the floor a little bit when Trish settles herself into it. Her knees are bare under her dress and they brush against the side of Jessica’s leg as Trish sits to face her. She doesn’t right herself when the bartender makes his way over. She orders a drink without turning away from the profile of Jessica’s face, Trish’s whole body angled toward her.

“Well?” Trish says around the rim of her glass.

“Well what?”

“Say it.”

“Say what?” Jessica asks. She’s picking at the label of her half-empty beer bottle, trying for innocent. Trish leans even further forward, feels the hard seam of Jessica’s pant leg against her knees where they’re still pressed together.

“Say ‘happy birthday,’ you asshole.”

Jess’s mouth stretches from a smirk to a grin and Trish feels the shift of it like a muscle beneath her ribs. “Happy birthday, you asshole.”

Trish feels a grin of her own split her face in two and doesn’t look away even as she lifts two fingers to signal for another round.

\--

It’s a Tuesday when she does it. She uses an alias. Nearly buys a wig to wear in the waiting room before deciding against it, wears a cap instead. She pays in cash, doesn’t bother with insurance.

The doctor, when he finally comes in, looks to be in his mid-seventies and this for whatever reason makes Trish even more uncomfortable. She’s uncomfortable enough in her flimsy paper gown, her feet up in stirrups. The overly conditioned air pulls up goosebumps on her arms. 

Neither the doctor nor his nurse say much to her as they work, they almost never make eye contact. The loudest sound in the room is the clang of metal on metal as the doctor discards one instrument on the mayo stand for another. 

Trish keeps her eyes trained on a spot on the ceiling and works to keep her breathing even and steady. She tries not to clench.

She does not wish someone were here with her.

She does not wish someone were holding her hand.

She does not think about having to take a cab home.

She does not think about waking up in the morning.

Trish breathes and she doesn’t cry and she waits for it to be over and she refuses to feel ashamed.

\--

“Do you remember that time we snuck out to Coney Island?” Jess is saying. Her voice is low simmer in the back of her throat; hot and sweet, but sharp. It’s like honey on a razorblade, like Jess might cut her tongue if she said the wrong words.

“Yeah,” Trish tells her. She rolls her head a little to one side so her temple meets the soft angle of Jessica’s shoulder. They’ve been lying side by side on Trish’s unmade bed, not touching until now. “Yes.”

Coney Island when they were fifteen was rebellion. It was skipping school and taking the ferry and fingers sticky with cotton candy and a million other things Dorothy hated. 

It was Trish looking up at Jess through her eyelashes and the drop in Trish’s stomach at the top of Cyclone and the shock of Jess’s warm hand in hers. Coney Island was the press of Jess’s side at the top of the Ferris wheel and the perfect bow of Jess’s lips under Trish’s mouth for the first time.

Trish doesn’t say that now, doesn’t say anything. She keeps her head on Jess’s shoulder, her eyes open just enough to catch the rise and fall of Jess’s chest as she breathes. Trish slows her own breathing to match, finds Jess’s hand with her own in the tiny space between them and tangles their fingers.

\--

Jessica fucks off to god knows where with some jagoff she calls “Kilgrave” and only calls Trish once a month, if that, and doesn’t come home.

Then she does. 

 

Then she leaves again.

 

Trish turns Jessica’s room into a home gym and puts Jess’s stuff in storage and only cries a little and then takes up Krav Maga. She learns how to throw punches and how to land kicks and how to disarm someone with a gun pointed at her face. 

She relearns how to get hit. This time she wears each bruise like a badge. 

Trish learns how to protect her body and her _virtue_ and she thinks it’s too late for her heart. 

She puts new locks on her door. She builds a panic room.

\--

Trish considers hiring a private investigator, but feels like a stalker. Like a psycho ex. 

She hires one anyway. 

The irony isn’t lost on her, in retrospect.

\--

Jessica appears on her balcony, uninvited, in what’s probably that same old pair of jeans.

Trish shoos away her company and wraps a throw around her shoulders before heading out into the night air. As if a blanket could protect her, as if she needed protecting. As if there wasn’t already something between them like a shield.

Jess can hardly look at her, definitely can’t hold still, and Trish tightens her grip on the blanket to keep from reaching out to touch, to prove Jessica is real in front her.

“I need money,” she says through her teeth, grimacing like it pains her to ask. Trish feels it like a knife between her ribs twisting, twisting.

Trish doesn’t invite Jessica in. She leaves Jess to scowl at the cold while she ducks inside to get the cash.

Trish thought about this a thousand times, a hundred different ways, and at least half those scenarios end just like this: Jessica disappearing again into the night and Trish, alone, looking after her.

\--

It turns out the world is even uglier than she thought it was and people can be even crueler than she thought they could and after everything there is still so much that Trish doesn’t know about people and the awful ways they can hurt each other.

Trish hires a door repairman. She buys a custom-printed pane of glass. She guesses at the font and she answers her phone when Jess calls.

 

“I can’t risk you,” Jess tells her. The catch in Jess’s voice is a match striking is a new flame is a fever heat and Trish’s happiness breaks like a fever again and again and she still somehow manages to convince herself each time will be different than the last.

 

Trish calls Kilgrave out over the air, names him for the coward he is, would’ve kept carrying on if Jess hadn’t intervened and destroyed what was likely thousands of dollars’ worth of recording equipment and airtime. Then Trish knees a fan in the gut and Jessica has to drag her away before she’s done apologizing, pulls her into the open air of the city street to flag down a cab, and Jess nearly trips over her words in a rush to get them out of her mouth. Her grip is a vice on Trish’s arm.

\--

Trish wakes up in a hospital bed after going a couple rounds with the super cop. She opens her eyes and Jess is there, sprawled like a ragdoll in an uncomfortable-looking chair.

The next time Trish opens her eyes the sun is out and Jessica’s gone.

\--

Her mother never fails to disappoint. Wheedling for a job. Withholding information. Masking her judgment with back-handed pleasantries.

If nothing else, she’s consistent.

\--

There’s Ruben.

There’s Kilgrave’s parents.

There’s Luke.

(There's _Luke_.)

There’s Jess fucking shacking up with Kilgrave in her childhood home.

There’s the click of a hammer and an empty chamber and Trish trying to literally put a bullet in her skull.

Not necessarily in that order.

How horrible it is that Trish can’t tell which is worse, that she honestly has to think about it?

\--

There’s a moment in the car before the docks, when Trish is trying to explain the importance of a code, of some kind of signal, something Jess would never say so that Trish will know that Jessica is still Jessica.

(There was a time when Trish had thought she’d know the difference, that the decade they spent growing together meant that Trish knew Jess like she knew her own shadow and her own secrets; that she knew all the loud and quiet parts of her that she was made up of. Once, Trish had thought she’d know if someone else was in there, if something vile had slid its way in between the layers Jess kept around herself. There was a time when Trish had thought she’d be able to tell if something was so deeply and fundamentally wrong by just the sound of Jessica’s voice, or the light in her eyes. 

But there was also a time when Trish didn’t know, when she couldn’t tell, when she stayed mired in her own doubt and resentment and had been completely oblivious.

So. 

A signal.)

“Something I never say?” Jess considers. Her eyes flick down for a moment and she takes a breath like she’s steeling herself for something, like whatever she’s about to put down is heavy. “Like, ‘I love you’.” 

She doesn’t agree. She doesn’t say it back. She watches Jess haul herself out of the passenger seat instead, Trish’s tongue cotton in her mouth. Her heart thunders on in her chest like the traitor it is.

Trish addresses her steering wheel, says _that’ll do_ before she shifts the car into gear and pulls out.

 

\--

The headphones are Trish’s idea. They work until she loses them.

Kilgrave’s voice rings in Trish’s ears and inside her head when he commands her. His compulsion is being an unwilling passenger on a ride with no exit that you can’t control that’s always careening dangerously and you want to throw up and you want to not listen to him but you can’t not listen to him and you can’t do anything but exactly what he tells you and you _want_ to do it and you _don’t_ want to do it and while you cycle back and forth you’re doing it anyway.

That’s when Kilgrave makes Trish come to him and she walks right past Jessica and she wants to hold onto Jess to stop walking and she wants Jess to hold on to her to stop her walking but Jess just stands there and Trish keeps walking and Kilgrave keeps talking like he has any right to tell Jess how she feels like he has any fucking _idea_ at all.

Trish wants to punch him in the mouth, knock out his teeth, rip out his tongue, tear apart his lungs so he can never talk again, but she kisses him instead because he tells her to and she means it because he tells her to and Trish can feel Jess’s eyes on her, can feel the heat of Jess’s rage at having to watch this from where she stands and that makes it just the tiniest bit bearable because Trish knows Jess will fucking _kill him_ for this. 

 

She's not wrong. 

\--

 

It doesn’t end here.

There’s an arrest and there’ll probably be a trial and Trish’s mother won’t stop calling and Jessica still doesn’t know what she’s going to do about Luke, but there is also this:

The white porcelain of Jess’s skin that Trish can’t mark with nails or teeth, but blooms beautifully with the rosy flush of Jess’s arousal. The wet heat of Jess’s mouth when Trish kisses her, greedy, noses bumping and lips bitten red in their haste and fervor for more. The tension that coils like a spring in Trish’s belly and pools low and hot when Jess lifts her bodily and carries her to the bed. The breathless _wow_ Jess lets out when she first slides two fingers into Trish and the way Trish can’t even bring herself to keep her eyes open to watch, her chest too tight, too full.

There’s waking up in the morning still naked in a tangle on one side of the bed and arguing gently about who has to get up and make the coffee.

There’s salvaging whatever’s left of them to give and giving it.

**Author's Note:**

> moreimportantthings.tumblr.com


End file.
